Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says schools not on track to graduate at least half of their basketball players should be barred from competing in the NCAA men's and women's tournaments.

If such a standard were in place now, three women's teams and 10 men's teams, including traditional powers Syracuse and Purdue, would not be in the tournaments.

Duncan said in an interview with USA TODAY that the NCAA should use its Academic Progress Rate as the metric to measure tournament teams. He proposes bans for teams with a score lower than 925, which predicts a graduation rate of roughly 50% of a team's players.

"The math on this is not complicated," Duncan said. "If you can't graduate one in two of your student-athletes, I just question the institutional commitment to academics. And I think if the NCAA were to draw a line in the sand, you'd see this behavior change very rapidly."

Duncan cites a Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics analysis, out today, that says 43.7% of the revenue paid to conferences from the men's tournament over the last five years was earned by teams not on track to graduate half of their players.

The NCAA thinks that figure is no more than 20%, vice president of communications Bob Williams said.

"Money talks," Duncan said. "So right now there is an absolute perverse incentive. Folks follow the money, and the money says, 'We don't care about academic outcomes.' If the NCAA said, 'Well, we actually do care about academic outcomes' (by banning teams with low rates), I guarantee you behavior would change very, very rapidly. This is eminently solvable."

The NCAA also wants "better academic performance, especially for teams playing in the postseason," Williams said by e-mail. "Our governance bodies are exploring ways to improve academics, particularly related to initial eligibility standards. This will ensure that students are better prepared to be successful in the classroom when they arrive. … We hope to collaborate with the Department of Education to improve college preparation for all students."

The current overall multiyear APR for Division I men's basketball is 940.

"What I just continue to be stunned by is why we let a handful of bad apples taint the entire process," said Duncan, who played basketball at Harvard. "This isn't rocket science."